Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate.

Cave Moon Press, ADHD, & Poems to Help Homeless Vets

Doug Johnson, creator and publisher of Cave Moon Press, published both of my books on Alzheimer’s –Dear Alzheimer’s: A Caregiver’s Diary & Poems(2013) and Listening to Mozart: Poems of Alzheimer’s (2014). This guy gets around. Not only does he run a publishing company, he’s a school teacher, musician and novelist, as well as an active husband, father and grandfather. Plus, he rides a motorcycle the length of my house and is now publishing Footsteps, an anthology of poems for homeless veterans, which he and poet Paul Nelson are editing.

I have a hard time balancing different facets of my life. I don’t “multi-task.” Now that my kids are grown and have kids of their own – and I’m no longer caregiving – I focus on one thing at a time. When I get that done, I go on to something else. Doug seems to do a number of things at one time and he does them all so smoothly that I sent him this question:

Esther: “How do you balance all the creative pieces of your life?—poetry, children, music, marriage, house, church, noveling, publishing, friendships and so on. What am I forgetting? Do you garden on your land, make wine, sing with a choir?”

Doug: Yes I garden and bottle gourmet vinegar. My angel [wife] and I also remodel houses and ride Harleys as much as we can.

I think the idea of balance is 1) overrated and 2) a matter of perspective. Here’s my protracted opinion.

The Taoist speaks of being one with the Tao. Others call it finding the flow. The bottom line is that I was blessed with too much physical energy in a pre-Ritalin culture. I have spent my life ignoring the balanced and sedated culture.

In our modern culture I gladly take on the label of ADHD. I just don’t think it is a disorder. I was also blessed with a father who thought basic training from the military was the perfect parenting model. The answer to ADHD was simply the fear of God put into you by a stern father. Pretty simple formula. I still drove him nuts, jumping off the roof of our house as a child but knew that if I misbehaved at school I’d be in hugetrouble with the sergeant. Whenever a teacher even scolded me and threatened to call my dad I thought, “Just bury me in the back of the school yard. Don’t call my dad!” My parents were saints.

That’s where I think it comes from perspective. I am hard wired with an enormous amount of physical and mental energy and as a child I noticed all the matriarchs had the same thing. Nobody called them disordered. They were called industrious. My grandmother had 30 grandchildren and when she gave the gift of a quilt she made 30. It was her standard. When she decided to embroider a gift she made 30 of them. My mother still works at age 70. I saw other older people where this amount of energy was not a deficit but the norm. My father-in-law worked concrete in his late 40’s, went home and worked on the 3000 sq. foot house he was building for my mother-in-law until he dropped into bed.

For all of these people the idea of work and leisure took on more of an agrarian model of our grandparents. I live in an agricultural valley and have stories in my memory of farmers getting up to tend smoke pots at the freeze at all hours of the morning. I have other stories of mothers who get up at all hours of the night to tend a sick child. My sister has a chronic illness and so my own mother sacrificed years tending with little to no sleep. Where’s the balance in that? 100 years ago people worked in factories 14 hours a day. Was it humane? Not sure. I just know that we used to have a joy in working dawn to dusk and loving our families. Electric light has done a great disservice to our sense of balance and so instead of sleeping in normal circadian rhythms I find more hours to work. Our current leisure culture is bereft of that notion. We have no joie de vivrebecause we have no definitions. We have no notion of love. We have no sense of time, season, work or joy. We are consumed with our pains of convenience. We don’t actively pursue our passions.

So in many ways, I have no balance in this current culture. Weekends are an artifice of the Industrial Age. Because of this, we have no sense of time or [the] sacred. We refuse Shalom. We refuse the Tao. We refuse the flow.

From birth I have been driven to find the edge of life. I drive my motorcycle over Snoqualamie at 20 degrees. I ride my bicycle in traffic just to dodge cars. I ride my bicycle in 100 degrees and 5 degrees.

Discovering the edges in poetry

Why? I want to discover the edges in poetry. I want to discover the edges of a novel. I want the tundra of my visual art. I want to celebrate the love of all that we have in this existence. It is temporal. We could die tomorrow. I could become a speed bump on my bicycle. It would be a great day because today I ran with the bulls and stretched to the limit.

I use the capacity of how I am built. I am always moving and drawing. I had a supervisor once say, “You know they make medicine for that.” I replied, “I’m not broken. There’s nothing to medicate.”

I feel sad for our children who are medicated to appease their pudgy parents. I feel sad for our children who are medicated because their teachers only think of one thing at a time and need to sit behind their desks.

I have been blessed with an angel of a wife. She tells me when to eat and sleep. The sun rises and sets with her and the only thing I know is that all the endeavors are only to celebrate an epic love story that only the myths speak of through any fairy tale.

So how do I balance?

I don’t. Today is too important. My family is too important. Art is too important. Running at top speed and on full throttle is the only way my spirit feels free. Whatever it takes to maintain that joie de vivreis what I do. Other people find other ways. This is the one I learned from my grandmother. This is how I breathe.

Esther: Whew! I’m one of those who sits behind a desk. I can sit with a book or my diary for hours at a time. I sit in front of the computer until just before my back hurts, get up and exercise a bit, and sit back down to read or write; before and after I take my Emma out.

Emma in Lake Washington

When all my kids are in town I run around with them. They direct me to a parade, a run, a mountain or bike ride. I’m slow. I do everything slow. Walk, read, write, all slowly. As slowly as I can. I will never ride a motorcycle or climb a mountain or even make vinegar and, yet, I’ve also been told that I have ADHD. This, when I was taking care of Abe. I couldn’t sit still. When I was talking to his doctor I couldn’t focus. I jumped from one subject to another. I fidgeted, wrung my hands, fiddled with my hair. He said: “Abe’s fine but you’re a mess” and gave me Prozac.

When I was raising my kids as a single parent, I did a million things at a time–went to school, worked (research assistant, Sears, teaching assistant, Sears, writing-group facilitator, Sears), wrote papers (got in-completes) ran this kid or that back and forth to an activity, the hospital, followed them when they were delivering papers at 5 am. I was a multi-tasker before the word was popular. Now I sit and do my work. My out-of-town grandkids were just here and I loved every minute of them. I played with them; I watched and adored them. And was sad when they left. More than sad. It took me a day to get my bearings back (and change the linen). Now I sit and write again.

I so admire Doug for all that he accomplishes. I also think he’s right about ADHD and filling people up with drugs to make them slow down. I couldn’t slow down when I was taking care of Abe. There was no one to help me, even when I had help. I needed to interact with the situation in the only way I knew how. By being there on the spot. Now, thanks to the Tao or God or Sappho, I have the luxury to sit still. Does that mean that when a life situation demanded I run instead of walk I had ADHD and I don’t now? I don’t think so.

Thank you, Doug, for your insights and for your running. If my physicality and acuity still allowed me to move faster I probably would. We’re all different. Human beings do what they can. I’d like to see us, including doctors, acknowledge our differences without medicalizing everything we do.

Now, the initial reason for this blog. I’m afraid I went off on a tangent. (Is that ADHD?)

Submit to Cave Moon’s new anthology. Here are the guidelines:

Call for submissions for Footsteps步

To celebrate 10 years of helping communities, Cave Moon Press will produce a new book to aid homeless veterans in 2016 and is requesting original poems centered around the theme of footsteps. They encourage poets to take license in interpreting whose footsteps you honor, and translations are welcome. To apply:

Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate.